winxp boots only to f1 f10 screen

[nancy]

Have Winxp My son got a virus on it so it boots to compaq screen, with f1 setup, f10 recovery, so shut off pc, reboot in first few seconds hit f10 nouthing, f1 says entering setup but just stays at that screen. So video working, boots only to screen with f1 f10, I have a startup disk win98 tryed that, wont boot to disk I need to get to bios to change boot status to floppy drive??? I think but its frozen. Maybe its a different F-key HELP and will startup disk 98 work for XP-OS

[Whyzman]

I'm not sure about a Compaq...It appears that you are prompted to hit F1 to get into the BIOS setup?

Have you tried tapping the Delete key after pushing the power button?

If F1 is the usual way...I would suggest clearing the CMOS and see if that makes a difference being able to access the BIOS/Setup... If that works, you can change the boot order to A:

Be sure before you put any floppy disk into the drive that you have it write protected...

Are you using NTFS or FAT on WinXP?

[Paul Komski]

I'm not saying its the same problem but coincidentally someone brought me in a PC yesterday with the same problem and all it needed was a new CMOS battery. If the PC was losing time lately then that would make a weak battery likely to be the same cause. In changing the battery, leave the PC unpowered and the battery out for 5mins and you are likely to reset the CMOS settings into the bargain.